Notes toward an essay - an optimistic view

 There is a sense that a moment of crisis has passed - psychologically, if not politically. The worst possibilities that many of us feared have not yet materialized, and perhaps they never will. The right has shown itself, in the final analysis, to be cowardly and weak - concerned more with projecting the appearance of power than effectively wielding it. This is not to minimize the harms that they have inflicted - one cannot, and should not, overlook those who have been and continue to be killed, brutalized, falsely imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise immiserated by this regime, and one hopes that all involved in committing these crimes will be held to account. Only that the psychic disturbance, the sense of being "under siege" that seemed omnipresent since last year's election, has lessened by several degrees. 

Looking back, the "failures" of wokeness (I put this in quotes because we do not yet have enough distance to say for sure that it failed) were one, in not always providing a clear alternative (that is, a vision) to the system it criticized, leaving many uncertain and confused; two, in sometimes treating good-faith criticism as bad-faith reaction (though the ratio of good-faith criticism to bad-faith reaction was, relatively speaking, small); and three, in not continuing to aggressively check the reactionaries when they were on the back foot and flailing. That would have been the time to really cut out the rot.

None of these, in my opinion, invalidated the broader directionality of the movement - and those who said they did were often using that as an excuse to object to the directionality itself - but it wasted our energies and left us unfocused. This was, I think, a sign of a lack of confidence, of uncertainty in our purpose. And in fact we were emerging from a liberal culture which had, in so many ways, been "hollowed out" - which had made so many accommodations for conservatism and reaction that it could no longer defend itself. We needed to rediscover the principles, and more importantly the vision, that made such a culture worth fighting for - which paradoxically, by giving us the confidence of purpose, would allow us to be more firm and less reactive in our resistance to tyranny. 

It is hard to define exactly what that vision is, but what seems to have emerged, almost organically, is a renewed sense of solidarity with our neighbors and fellow citizens: "One for all and all for one" - which one hopes will carry into the future.

Of course, one cannot be certain of anything; "nothing ever ends." In another month I might look back at this optimistic forecast with regret (and in fact I already do).